Thoughts

We decided a few months ago, in order to save some money and have a little more breathing room in the financial department, to cut cable.  Now with a computer intelligent husband and modern technology, we do not miss very much and my subscription to Netflix opened the doors to such train wreck...cannot look away...shows like Confessions: Animal Hoarding (don't judge me).  One of the channels I miss, Current is now Al Jazera USA, but on Current was a documentary show called Vanguard and Adam and I loved it.  We watched every Vanguard that came out and we watched this one....

American Jihadi    

The documentary follows the history of Alabama born Omar Hammami, a pretty normal southern kid who was smart, had friends... lived normally with his Syrian born father and American mother until he became radicalized, went to Canada, Yemen, and eventually Somalia and became a terrorist...

It is an insane documentary and one that kind of stuck with me because I was like... what is wrong with this kid??!!??  Hammami was on twitter, pretty regularly and he slowly went on the outs with his terrorist organization al-shabaab and then they started trying to kill him, and according to them and pretty reliable sources... they have.

American Terrorist Killed  

I read this article last night about Omar, twitter, and the odd relationship he had with one of the journalists who followed him...

Omar and Me 

The article was really interesting and it says a lot about how social media and how close communications have enabled people to discuss or even connect in the oddest of ways.   Reading the author's continual frustration with this stupid dude who just couldn't get his egotistical head out of his ass enough to realize that not only had he gone into some false world of activism, but he had options had me reading by the light of my phone at midnight, which is way past my post Aiden bedtime.

You just wonder why on earth do people think its sensible to kill people, to shoot each other, to do anything this assinine when they have the opportunity to do so much.... live in a pretty stable society, have friends, family...everything and then like they just lost their senses and in Omar's case...get so caught up in their own stupidity that they would rather get shot than admit...OK I'm an idiot, I need to get out of this.

I am going to admit I have a prejudice here, I abhor militant religious groups, I think they are the exact opposite of any sort of message of faith and when you start to babble about killing people and use your scripture to do it, you are cherry picking to the point of absurdity and you aren't practicing your faith AT ALL.  This goes for ANY militant religious group.  There are terrorists in all sorts of faiths...  Look at the word terrorist, terror...who would want to inflict that on anyone??  Let alone innocent people who what... represent the entity you have a beef with?  Get over it... when will these idiots learn that when you hurt a kid, an innocent bystander, anyone... it doesn't scare people, it makes them mad...and then more violence, more stupidity???  I get that and I am not a springing well of knowledge. 

Even Buddhists  

I think I just got really frustrated with this story because you want to reach through the screen, slap this kid and go...get your shit together and stop being an idiot... you have no reason to be doing this, you are only causing more hurt, strife, and death for innocent people when you and your idiot enemies shoot, bomb, and kill each in the name of something you obviously don't fully understand.  No kid in Alabama has any reason to have any jihad against anyone..... So you don't agree with a war, YOU are in America... out of a lot of places you have the right to work on that, express that, go to college... go in to politics and foreign relations and become someone who does something GOOD not someone who is an idiot, becomes a murderer, thinks its a good idea to attempt to brainwash other idiot kids into doing what you did, and get murdered on the other side of the world causing your family more pain and hurt just because you were too stupid to realize you messed up.  

Moral of the story here... Don't be stupid and get caught up in crap you don't understand.  I have no idea what life is like for anyone else but me, I am not going to juxtapose my life experience and my opinions with someone in a world I know nothing about and while it may sound selfish, I am going to worry about me, worry about my family.    I have opinions...  I pretty much think that violence, war, aggression of any kind is pretty ignorant when you get down to it and if we spent more time trying to get along than we do trying to tear each other down, things would be a lot better.